Low-Cost Organic LED Production-OLED Technology

It is not just the fact that modern green technologies and solutions aim at producing ways of harnessing energy from the renewable and clean energy sources, but they also are focusing on the conservation part of energy. They are working on the simple principle that energy saved is energy produced and in this regard, LEDs have played a very important role in the past few years. When it comes to making sure that lighting technologies are conserving energy, they have made a quantum leap from the traditional sources and methods.

LEDs (or Light-Emitting Diodes) will slowly become the lighting standard over the next decade. But light bulbs won’t be the only products to take advantage of their efficient properties. A variety called OLED (or Organic Light-Emitting Diode) are thin, organic materials sandwiched between two electrodes, which illuminate when an electrical charge is applied. This technology is behind all those cool flexible displays and electronic ink displays we’re always seeing. They’re so thin, that they could be applied to rooms as a type of wall paper to glow at the touch of a finger or when someone enters the room.

The challenge in producing these OLEDs is that they also have to have potential to be made at a very low cost, because they can be printed “roll-to-roll” like a newspaper. GE recently demonstrated the first OLEDs to be made in this manner. Apparently, the researchers worked for four years on this project. The project still has a long way to go before making sure that the OLEDs are ready for commercial use.

The process of commercially manufacturing OLEDs has remained expensive. However, a recent breakthrough from GE hopes to lower the cost-barrier and show that OLED can be created “roll to roll”.